This week, I read an article featuring media biases. In this article, W. Lance Bennett, a political scientist, talked about four biases in nowadays news stories, including personalization, dramatization, fragmentation and the authority-disorder bias. The discussion about the four biases expanded my outlook and deepen my understanding of news reporting. Today, I want to talk about one of the biases-personalization.
According to Bennett’s article, personalization in media coverage indicates the "overwhelming tendency to downplay the big social, economic or political picture in favor of the human trials, tragedies and triumphs that sit at the surface of events." Indeed, lots of the news stories feature the central compelling character’s trials and experiences. Generally speaking, when a journalist can tell a compelling story of the main character, they can connect the readers emotionally. However, merely telling a story of a person is not enough. According to the journal article in journalism studies, emphasizing the personal aspect of news may make the story more appealing to readers and viewers. However, the greater complexity of the issue may be ignored or relegated. As journalists, we not only need to cover the story of a person but also need to reveal the bigger story that they are part of. An excellent story needs to bridge the gap between one person’s story and the stories of a group of people, thus hooking audiences into a more serious analysis of issues and problems.
To illustrate this problem even further, I looked into one of the works that won the Pulitzer Prize for 2019. This story talked about international criminal gangs’ influence on Salvadoran immigrants’ lives. Although the author used the perspective of one teenager to tell the story, the author successfully converted the story of one person into a story reflecting the general struggles of the immigrants by giving readers a lot of contexts. For instance, by revealing the demographic background of the group of immigrants, the article presented the serious issue of gang crime and how Trump’s immigration policies affected the immigrants who already faced a lot of challenges.
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